JWT-based access to REST services

Details

Description

Since the beginning, access to the REST services is protected via Basic Authentication, with credentials sent along each and every request.

As improvement, we can switch to an architecture where there is an explicit REST service for obtaining some sort of token (requiring credentials) and then all other REST services can be accessed by sending along such token instead of credentials.
This will ease future works for enabling SSO via SAML, OAuth 2.0 or other standards.

About the token format, it seems that JSON Web Tokens are quite the default choice, especially considering the support that CXF already provides for that.